We brace ourselves for news like this, we child-free women. For the third year in a row – it was revealed last week – the fertility rate for England and Wales has fallen and is now at a record low.
In 2024, the average number of children per woman fell to 1.41, when the rate we need to keep the population stable is apparently 2.1. And so once again the debate begins – why are women not having babies? And the finger of blame starts swinging towards women just like me…
Childless, child-free, there seem to be many ways to label me and my ilk. I’ve been called a Pank (Professional Aunt No Kids), however, as I am also partnerless, you can add an ‘S’ for Single to the acronym and call me a Spank! Let me explain further, because you could also call me a NoMo, or ‘Not Mother’. This friendly term was coined by Jody Day, a former psychotherapist who in 2009 founded the support network, Gateway Women, for childless women aged 35 and over. It’s called that because it aims to help women crossing the life threshold of non-motherhood (whether intentional or not) and experiencing the myriad emotions that can arise from living an offspring-free life.
Not all the labels we are given are neutral, of course. In China I’d be called a ‘Leftover Woman’ and in South Korea I’d now be a ‘Gold Miss’ – it used to be ‘Old Miss’, but they’ve realised the spending power of the commitment-free. Though plenty of others around the world, not least the US Vice President JD Vance, blame women just like me for harming the economy by failing to procreate while labelling us bitter at the same time. Of course, we are also known as Cat Ladies, shorthand for Old Crones.
Most of these names don’t bother me. Put me in a category if it makes you feel better – I’ll be in there with 18 per cent of the UK female population (often rounded up to The Twenty Percenters – yet another label). But really, I’m just me, living my life with some of it turning out as I’d hoped for and some of it not so much. I imagine a good portion of the women (and men) who have ended up childless feel the same.
I’m not a woman who actively chose not to have kids (no judgement here, I have several friends who very much did make that choice). Nor have I had painful struggles with fertility. I always wanted children, thought that I’d meet ‘The One’ and we’d start a family. But we didn’t meet. And I had no interest in travelling the solo child-rearing route.
Edwina Ings-Chambers always wanted children and thought she’d meet ‘The One’ and they’d start a family, but this didn’t happen
I thought I had time. But then, and long before I expected it, nature made the final decision for me. I don’t know why my body shut down that side of things early, though my personal belief is that a whole heap of work-related stress certainly didn’t help.
Do I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have my own kids and to be called ‘Mummy’? Sure. But I don’t dwell on it. What would be the point? I am where I am and my life is good – and full of children, from nieces and nephews to friends’ kids who consider me part of the security blanket of their lives.
Though even that’s a curious justification that childless women often feel the need to make; no childless man flags his child/life ratio for approval and no woman should have to either.
I’m not so OK with the casual cruelty that gets thrown at women without children, the idea that our feelings don’t matter, that we’re fair game for insults. The idea that it is our fault the fertility rate has dropped, instead of looking at the huge societal changes in the past 100 years or so, which are really to blame.
There are the ‘so don’t you like children then?’ lines dropped into conversations that have left some childless friends beating a hasty retreat before tears overwhelm them.
There are all kinds of reasons why a woman doesn’t have children and many are incredibly personal and painful. So, although no one wants to spend their life treading on endless eggshells, my plea is to think twice before crashing in on the topic.
I’ve had experiences that felt deliberately hurtful and diminishing. There was the female boss who, some years ago, just as I was realising my fertility was shutting up shop, told me I had nothing in my life that mattered except my job because I was neither married nor had children. The worst thing is that she had me doubting myself for a while, at a time when I was already struggling with the realisation that it was to be a childless life for me. Was I pointless? An irrelevance who simply shouldn’t exist?
Eventually, I realised it was her problem, her bigotry, not mine. But would she have said the same to a man? Or told anyone else that their life had no value?
Somehow it’s always open season on childless women.
In a more recent example: a tenant in my building thought it was acceptable to verbally eviscerate me and my life because my womb hadn’t lived up to its potential. She (or, more precisely, her nanny) left her child’s pushchair in the hall, something someone complained about at the building’s AGM. I was on the mother’s side – who wants to carry a buggy as well as a toddler up several flights of stairs? I said I had no problem with it. However, one of the company directors overheard the conversation and told a fellow director – who was the tenant’s landlady – that it was against regulations and the buggy must never be left there.
A few weeks later I ran into said tenant in the hall. Did I have kids, she asked me. No, I said. And that was it: she launched into an insult-laden tirade that lasted for at least ten minutes and included my selfishness, inability to sympathise and lack of consideration. I kept trying to tell her that she had the wrong person, but my childlessness was enough for her to assume I was clearly the culprit. Her level of vileness and ignorance was astounding.
In 2024, the average number of children per woman fell to 1.41, when the rate we need to keep the population stable is apparently 2.1
Her sense of entitlement – to brand me as inconsequential because of my child-free state – left me reeling.
She still leaves the pram in the hall and no doubt assumes she browbeat me into submission. She’s wrong on every level of her presumptions about me.
My life may not look as I expected it to look – or how others think it should. But it’s a good life and one full of love and value. I’ve long since made my peace with not being a mother. I may not have children of my own, but I am not selfish. I am not a disinterested party in the future of the planet. I am not bitter and twisted. I am not a shrivelled up old prune with nothing to offer the world.
If we have not produced an heir to pay for our state pension or care for us when we’re old (assuming, of course, that they’d be up for that task), neither have we used NHS maternity services, childcare subsidies or state schools – though I’ve paid my taxes into all of those pots.
So instead of judgement, maybe those two women (and anyone else with odious JD Vance-like preconceptions about childless women) could open their minds to see that there’s great value in women without kids who have compassion, wisdom and time to give. We’re a part of the whole, not apart from the world.
Nor are we mere statistics – even though our needs seem to be largely ignored.
If we make up almost a fifth of the UK’s female population, then perhaps it’s finally time to see we have value in and of ourselves and are as much a part of society’s structure as anyone else, even if we don’t each have 1.41 ‘Mini Me’s’ to bring to the table to prove it.
Are you a woman without children? Share your difficult experiences with us at [email protected]
